The Battle of Monte Cassino begins

On the evening of 17 January 1944, at 9 p.m., British troops began crossing the Garigliano in boats near the river’s mouth on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was the first major assault on the Gustav Line – the main German defensive position south of Rome – and at the same time the start of the fighting that went down in history as the first Battle of Monte Cassino. The attack was made by British X Corps under Lieutenant General Richard McCreery, part of Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army. Contrary to McCreery’s own fears, the attack took the Germans by surprise: within the first twenty-four hours ten British battalions were across, and the German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, concluded that he faced the “greatest crisis” of the whole campaign.

The statement that the battle “began” on 17 January needs one qualification. X Corps’ attack was the third phase of a broader Fifth Army offensive, planned for three corps in four stages. A French corps under General Alphonse Juin had been fighting in the mountains north of Cassino since 12 January, and on 16 January the Americans occupied Monte Trocchio, which the Germans had abandoned, in front of the Rapido. It was only the blow on the Garigliano, however, that carried the fighting onto the Gustav Line proper, which is why historians – and the very tradition of four battles of Monte Cassino – date its beginning from 17 January.

The Gustav Line and the monastery hill

After crossing the Volturno in October 1943 the Allies spent two months grinding their way through successive German delaying positions. The autumn rains, the mud and the mountains robbed them of their advantage in tanks and aircraft, and the assault on the Winter Line – the belt of fortifications in front of the Mignano gap – lasted from November until the middle of January. According to the American official history, the Fifth Army came up against the Gustav Line only on 15 January 1944, after six weeks of fighting for the last eleven kilometres, which had cost it some 16,000 killed, wounded and missing.

The Gustav Line, built from November by Organisation Todt engineers and forced labourers, cut across the Italian peninsula from the mouth of the Garigliano to the Adriatic coast. Its western part rested on water: on the Garigliano, on the short Gari river and on the Rapido, which in January 1944 – after downpours and thaws – were running high and fast. The Germans also dammed the Rapido and flooded the valley, turning it into a bog that tanks could not cross. Behind the rivers, on the mountain slopes, they blasted firing positions into the rock, built concrete bunkers and steel machine-gun cupolas, strung barbed wire and laid minefields. According to the American official history, the Germans laid about 24,000 mines on the banks of the Garigliano alone, among them wooden box mines that detectors could barely pick up.

The most important point on the whole line was the entrance to the valley of the Liri. Along it ran Highway 6 (the Via Casilina) – the only road to Rome in this part of Italy that armoured columns and supplies could use. The entrance was guarded by the small town of Cassino and the hill of Monte Cassino, rising 520 metres above it, with the Monte Cairo massif behind. From their summits German observers could see every movement on the plain and direct artillery fire with great accuracy.

On the summit of Monte Cassino stood the Benedictine abbey founded around 529 by Benedict of Nursia – the cradle of the order and one of the most important places of Western Christianity. Over the centuries the monastery had been destroyed by the Lombards, the Saracens and an earthquake, and each time it had been rebuilt. In the autumn of 1943 officers of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, led by Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel, took most of the abbey’s priceless library and archive to Rome, together with works of art from Neapolitan museums that had been stored there; some of the crates from Naples, however, ended up in Göring’s collection. Kesselring forbade his troops to enter the monastery itself and in December 1943 informed the Vatican and the Allies of this. A zone the Germans were not to occupy was drawn around the abbey, but the slopes of the hill below its walls became part of the defensive line. The aged abbot Gregorio Diamare (PL) remained in the monastery with a few monks and civilians who had sought refuge there.

Clark’s plan: Cassino and Anzio

The January attack on the Gustav Line was not a self-contained operation. Since December 1943 the Allied command – under pressure from Winston Churchill – had been preparing a landing behind the German lines at Anzio, about 55 kilometres south of Rome (Operation Shingle). Major General John Lucas’s US VI Corps was to land on 22 January. The date was fixed: the landing ships, needed for the invasion of France, for which Dwight Eisenhower was already preparing as supreme commander of the invasion forces, were to remain in the Mediterranean only until the beginning of February.

Clark defined the Fifth Army’s task on the main front in three ways. The attack was to pin the German divisions to the Gustav Line so that they could not be moved to Anzio; to draw to the front the reserves that Kesselring was holding near Rome; and finally – if it succeeded – to open the way up the Liri valley towards Frosinone and a link-up with the landing force. The plan of the army group commander, General Harold Alexander, assumed that the threat to their rear would induce the Germans to withdraw from Cassino to beyond Rome. Allied intelligence did not understand, however, that the Germans had been retreating all autumn precisely to gain time to build the Gustav Line – and that it was there they meant to make a stand for good.

The offensive was planned for three corps. On the right wing, in the mountains north of Cassino, the French corps was to attack towards Atina and Sant’Elia from 12 January. In the centre Major General Geoffrey Keyes’s US II Corps was to take Monte Trocchio on 15 January and on 20 January – once the British had secured its flank – to cross the Rapido near Sant’Angelo with the 36th Infantry Division and push the 1st Armored Division into the Liri valley. On the left wing British X Corps (the 5th, 46th and 56th Infantry Divisions and the 23rd Armoured Brigade) was to strike first: on 17 January across the lower Garigliano near Minturno, and on 19 January across the upper Garigliano near Sant’Ambrogio, below the mouth of the Liri. Clark himself, as his later notes show, did not count on a quick breakthrough; what mattered most to him was to tie down the Germans before Anzio.

The French in the mountains

The French moved first. General Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps – for the time being two divisions made up mostly of soldiers from North Africa, General André Dody’s 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division and General Joseph de Monsabert’s 3rd Algerian Infantry Division – attacked at dawn on 12 January. The Moroccans went in without a preliminary bombardment and surprised the Germans on the summit of Monna Casale; the Algerians took the heights above the road to Sant’Elia. The Germans responded with fierce counter-attacks, and the fighting was at close quarters, with grenades and bayonets. By 15 January the French had advanced about six kilometres and reached the upper Rapido, below the main line of German fortifications. There they had to stop – the four-day battle had exhausted both formations.

From the outset Juin believed that Cassino could be outflanked precisely through the mountains to the north, where the Germans least expected it. His later requests for reserves that would have allowed him to sustain this attack were turned down. In the centre the Americans attacked Monte Trocchio on 16 January and to their surprise found the hill empty: the commander of the German Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, had pulled his troops back across the river to stronger positions. By the evening of 16 January there were hardly any Germans left on the east bank of the Rapido. The Gustav Line faced the Fifth Army along its whole width.

The British on the Garigliano

McCreery did not expect to achieve surprise. The river was too deep to ford, both bridges in the corps sector – the road bridge on Highway 7 near Minturno and the railway bridge beside it – lay in ruins, and the banks and the exits from them were thickly mined. He therefore decided to force his way across: with two reinforced divisions on a four-brigade front, supported by artillery, aircraft and warships. On 16 and 17 January aircraft bombed German positions, and two cruisers and five destroyers shelled the coast, partly to mislead the enemy about where the blow would fall. On the left, by the river mouth, attacked Major General Philip Gregson-Ellis’s 5th Infantry Division; on the right, Major General Gerald Templer’s 56th (London) Infantry Division, supported by commandos.

On the other side stood the German 94th Infantry Division of General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin’s XIV Panzer Corps. Rebuilt after its destruction at Stalingrad, it had no combat experience and had both to defend the river and to guard the coast as far as Terracina against a landing. Vietinghoff and Senger did not trust it much, but they relied on the width of the river, the swift current and the mines. As late as 17 January Vietinghoff assured Kesselring by telephone that nothing out of the ordinary was in the offing, as the nights were moonless and the enemy had so far avoided such nights.

At 9 p.m. the infantry moved off. The first waves crossed in assault boats almost without loss and met hardly any resistance on the far bank. Not everything went well: a battalion of the 5th Division that was to outflank the river mouth from the sea landed from DUKW amphibians straight onto a minefield, and the craft carrying engineers, tanks and heavy weapons put in at the wrong bank by mistake. The engineers were unable to build bridges under artillery fire and among the mines – one lorry carrying bridging equipment ran onto a mine, and so did a second that tried to tow it away. Even so, in the first twenty-four hours ferries and rafts carried ten battalions across. On 19 January the 5th Division took Minturno, and the 56th Division, which had crossed the river at four points, established itself on the hills above the valley, near Castelforte. By dawn on 20 January the corps had sent 287 prisoners to the rear.

Poles also took part in the fighting on the Garigliano. According to the unit’s history, a sub-unit of Polish soldiers in the inter-Allied No. 10 Commando – Captain Władysław Smrokowski’s 6 Troop, which had arrived in Italy in December 1943 – operated alongside British commandos in the Aurunci Mountains above the river and suffered heavy losses in January.

Kesselring commits his reserves

Senger understood at once that this was no diversion. On the morning of 18 January he drove to the 94th Division’s command post and – bypassing Vietinghoff to save time – telephoned Kesselring directly. He warned that without the two divisions held in reserve near Rome a breakthrough of the Gustav Line on the Garigliano could not be prevented. If the British broke through into the Liri valley behind Cassino, the whole position would become pointless and the Tenth Army would have to fall back towards Rome.

Kesselring faced a difficult choice. Near Rome he was holding the 29th and 90th Panzergrenadier Divisions and the headquarters of I Parachute Corps – his only reserve in case of a landing on the long, exposed coastline. His chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, had assured him as late as 15 January that a major Allied landing was out of the question for the next four to six weeks; earlier the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had similarly reassured the German command in Italy. On the morning of 18 January Kesselring told Vietinghoff: “I am convinced that we are now facing the greatest crisis we have yet experienced.” That same day he sent both divisions and the corps headquarters to the Garigliano, and on 19 January Hitler approved the decision, demanding that the Gustav Line be held at all costs. Years later Senger admitted that in Kesselring’s place he would probably not have given up those divisions.

Failure at Sant’Ambrogio

The arrival of fresh divisions from Rome on 19 and 20 January halted the expansion of the bridgehead, and the first blow fell on the British right wing. During the night of 19–20 January Major General John Hawkesworth’s 46th Infantry Division tried to get one brigade across the Garigliano near Sant’Ambrogio, just below the mouth of the Liri. Three attempts were made to establish a bridgehead; the swift current snapped the ropes of the ferries and rafts, and fire from the Germans, already reinforced by troops from the reserve, pinned down those who reached the far bank. At dawn only a handful of soldiers were on the other side, and the command ordered them withdrawn. According to the American official history, it is hard to judge how much difference it made that Clark had had to take more than 40 DUKW amphibians from X Corps to replace equipment lost on 18 January during the unsuccessful dress rehearsal for the Anzio landing.

The 46th Division’s failure had serious consequences. It left uncovered the left flank of the US 36th Division, which was to cross the Rapido near Sant’Angelo the following night. McCreery believed that in these conditions the American attack had little chance. Clark wrote in his diary that he had to go ahead with it, “expecting heavy losses”, because only in this way would he pin the Germans on his front and open the way for the landing. He did not know that one of the aims of the offensive had already been achieved: it was the British crossing of the Garigliano that had drawn away from Rome the reserves that might have fallen on the Anzio beaches a few days later.

The rest of the first battle

In the days that followed X Corps held its bridgehead beyond the lower Garigliano but was unable to break out of it. The German panzergrenadier divisions counter-attacked on the hills above Minturno and Castelforte, and the British, lacking reserves, went over to the defensive. Over the whole first battle McCreery’s three divisions lost about 4,000 men. The ground they had won gave no way into the Liri valley, but it proved valuable four months later.

The main blow in the centre ended in disaster. During the night of 20–21 January Major General Fred Walker’s 36th Infantry Division began crossing the Rapido in fog, among minefields and under fire from the 15th Panzergrenadier Division; after two days of fighting the remnants of its regiments were withdrawn back across the river. On 22 January VI Corps landed at Anzio, taking the Germans completely by surprise, but within a few days Kesselring had assembled a new Fourteenth Army around the beachhead. From 24 January the US 34th Infantry Division attacked across the Rapido north of Cassino, supported by the French, and for two weeks fought its way through the mountains towards the monastery hill; its patrols came within a few hundred metres of the abbey walls. On Monte Cifalco and the Colle Belvedere the French lost about 2,500 men. On 11 February the exhausted II Corps was withdrawn and replaced by General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand–Indian corps. The first Battle of Monte Cassino ended in Allied failure: the Gustav Line had held.

Significance

The crossing of the Garigliano on 17 January 1944 opened the longest and bloodiest battle of the Italian campaign. It also revealed the campaign’s paradox: the attack on the flank proved the most effective, and the frontal assault on the best-defended point the least. Kesselring, who had taken the risk of stripping the area around Rome, was gambling everything for several days – the Anzio landing struck empty ground, but the Allies failed to exploit it. At the same time his decision showed that the German command had no intention of giving up the Gustav Line of its own accord.

The first battle was followed by others. In February Allied bombers destroyed the abbey, whose ruins the Germans then occupied and turned into a fortress – to this day one of the most controversial episodes of the war. In March the New Zealanders and Indians stormed the flattened town in vain. Only in May 1944, in the fourth battle (Operation Diadem), did the Gustav Line fall: Juin’s French broke through the Aurunci Mountains – from the bridgehead the British had won on the Garigliano in January – and General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps, brought to Italy at the turn of 1943 and 1944, raised the Polish flag over the ruins of the monastery on 18 May after heavy fighting. The road to Rome lay open, and on 4 June 1944 the Allies entered the city that the Germans had occupied in September 1943.